There's good news and bad news. Mostly bad news.
<Mahoosive Moan Mode>
I work night shifts. Well somebody has to and to be honest they aren't that bad. However, I sometimes struggle to get out of them. So I'm currently on days off after nights and every bloody morning I've woken between 4 and 5 AM and had to get up because there is no chance of sleeping. I then spend the day feeling utterly rotten and apathetic and from 6 in the evening I practically can't stay awake.
What really tweaks my nipples is that if this was jet lag I'd drift back in by an hour a day. But it doesn't work like that. I'm actually going backwards. Yesterday I woke at 4.30 AM - today it was 4 AM. And I could be like this for weeks. It's a killer trying to do day shifts when I'm not sleeping.
So, in the few moments when I'm awake and can force myself to do something I've been working on the car.
Er, no. Because it won't stop raining and I can't get outside. It's not even proper rain. If it'd just chuck it down in a massive storm it'd be fine. But it doesn't. It's little, fine, endless drizzle. You think you can get away with it but after 20 mins you are soaked to the skin.
Ever tried welding when you are cold and wet? No neither have I 'cos I'd make a balls of it.
</Mahoosive Moan Mode>
I actually didn't post this purely to have a huge whinge. So what have I actually achieved?
Well in the last episode I was working on the bottom of the rear arch. I dropped a line in saying that the skirt piece that fits over that area didn't look it was actually going to fit. So I thought I'd better find out.
It actually does fit. Well that's good news.
While I was there I marked the position of the shirt fixing holes.
Which is another interesting problem. Mr Toyota bolted the the skirts on with fat self tapping bolts into plastic inserts.
Well, most of the bolts are in a bad way and since this area has rotted off at least twice these ones are missing. I suspect they are littering a grass verge somewhere up the M40 where the car used to see action in its past life. And no I'm not going to look for them.
What I probably should do is see if Mr Toyota still sells them but I'm in a blue funk (see the first part of the post) and can't be bothered.
So I've tagged some M6 stainless nuts on.
That'll fix yer wagon!
That's ready to be welded to the car then. But due to the highly irritating and endless drizzle it's still in the garage.
In the words of the Blue Pearl song, "Take me welding naked in the rain". Yeah, maybe not.
Retro radios then…
General consensus is that the radio Mr Toyota fitted to the early MR2 was horrid. And mine is missing.
My car is 'fitted' (fitted in the loosest possible terms) with an Alpine 7289. There are good and bad points about this old thing.
Good - It's about the right period. It's was a very nice radio (expensive). It has full logic control of the cassette deck. It's mine.
Bad - It's hanging in the car on the dash escutcheon which isn't strong enough. The power amp section is unstable (I don't mean mechanically, I mean electronically - it's hissing like a git). It's picking up engine whistle too. It's too old to have an easy 'line in' put on it. It was very rare so I can't find much info on it.
Or I have a Kenwood KRC350-DAB.
Good - It's a nice radio with RDS. It's interesting because it's one of the early DAB sets. It has a 6CD changer.
Bad - It refuses to talk to the DAB box. (And also the CD changer because that plugs into the DAB box.) DAB is pointless where I live anyway so when it did work it didn't actually work. (God help me when the government turn FM off.) It's got a manual cassette deck. It's a bit 'modern' really.
Or I buy a period (or slightly later) Toyota set which would look the part.
So I have 2 radios that need fixing or I buy another that'll probably need fixing.
First job is to find if the engine whistle is the cars fault or the Alpine. Dig out the Kenwood and jury rig it into the car.
Alpine on the top, Kenwood on the bottom. (Not actually in the car - Toyota didn't fit much wood to the MR2.)
In the car the Kenwood didn't whistle or hiss so that's a fault with the Alpine. Thought as much. It also didn't sound very exciting. Nice, don't get me wrong, but the Alpine has a much warmer sound through the car's little speakers.
I think, to be fair, I wanted the Alpine anyway but this makes me really want it.
It has a pile of wires on the back of the cage - many still marked - some not. I'd worked out what most of them did but some were confusing and I was still thinking about the 'line in' conundrum. So I took it apart to see if I could get any clues from the boards and to have a look at the state of the capacitors which I thought could be the cause of the noise problems.
I lifted the cassette mech out and the power amp board on the back. Sadly I didn't take a photo of it in bits.
Lots of clues on the board, I now know what all the wires do. Caps look ok (not leaking) but that's no great indicator that they are ok.
The cage has an M bus socket for connecting to a CD player but the radio has no buttons for it. I've now found that the data connections don't actually land on the radio so the M bus socket can come off. That's handy because I have a broken pin in the connector for the 'pre amp out / line in' and I can now fix it.
Getting a real 'line in' isn't so easy. What Alpine did was put the output of the volume control on phono plugs so you can connect it to an external amp (which I might do). They also put the input to the power amp on phonos. That means you can run the line out through a graphic EQ and back into the power amp. Clever!
It also means you can stack two head units together and one can put the other into 'pause' mode and still have access to the power amp. The thing is you have a volume control on each head unit and use whichever you are listening to. So it's not a line in as such. Still I'll think about it. One day.
Photo shamelessly stolen off the internet to demonstrate the concept…
Yes, it's a DAT player on top!
Anyway the thought of my Alpine 7289 Radio Cassette stacked in the dash with an Alpine 5700 DAT player is really floating my boat so I'd better move swiftly on. That's proper posh retro though. Ohhh!
The up side of taking the Alpine apart is that the hiss and engine noise have gone. It was a dirty joint where the Amp board plugs into the bottom board. Yay! And I have to tell you it sounds really really nice. Really very really nice. I can see why these thing were so expensive back in the day.
So, the Alpine is definitely staying in the car. I knew that already to be honest. I just need a way to bolt it in the dash properly. In the words of Will Smith it's time to start "getin' jiggy wit it". I'm assuming he was talking about an old radio cage and the welder.
James
. I'm not sure where the truth is. Probably somewhere in the middle.
